I have always had a keen interest in local history and what shaped the environment around me, this has grown into partaking in a local project The People’s Archive Plymouth. The project is 100% volunteer powered and aims to create a free to use digital archive for Plymouth with artifacts such as scanned historic photographs, voice recordings and documents giving a glimpse into Plymouth’s past.
The project was initiated by Rob “Proper Janner” Miles, a local who for a number of years has run the Plymouth History and Plymouth Street Scenes Facebook groups. He grew frustrated at lack of accessibility to Plymouth’s history and in late 2025 teamed up with Plymouth Barbican Trust a local charity who aim to preserve heritage in Plymouth, particularly buildings in the Barbican area and The People’s Archive was born. The project has access to all of the Plymouth Barbican Trust’s materials including those from the former South West Image Bank (SWiB) project.
My personal involvement is multifaceted and includes curation of digitised artifacts ensuring they are well described, indexed appropriately and have accurate metadata. I also assist in the development of the software running the archive including the public facing archive search capability, the volunteer backend where ingestion and curation occurs, research database for volunteers as well as other capabilities such as automatic optical character recognition using both traditional and AI enabled techniques.
This page of my website also includes my personal notes regarding local history. Once these meet the threshold of quality required for committal to the archive they are exported as PDF for inclusion.